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The Sweet Sounds Of Sugar Bytes

03 Aug 2017

“Music is the sugar in the coffee of life,” proclaims the Sugar Bytes website, which also lays out their approach to plugin design: “To produce and provide better sounding, better looking audio software that’s easier to use and cheaper to get than everything that’s out there… That can do more stuff with less buttons, that have more features with less instructions, that is simply more fun and less expensive.” That’s a noble mission, and one that’s earned the Berlin-based company much critical acclaim ever since they launched their debut plugin Artillery, which brought the multi-effects paradigm into the DAW and MIDI controller realm.

Sugar Bytes was founded in 2003 by Robert Fehse (piano) and Rico Baade (guitar), who both have a strong and professional music background. Today, they lead a team of five, who take care of 13 plug-ins on four operating systems. They operate under the principal proposed by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: “Our [writing] instruments contribute to our thoughts”. That concept is palpable in their innovative and powerful creative software.

WOW2, featured in the Focusrite Plugin Collective for August 2017 (participants can get 50% off the plugin) is described by the Sugar Bytes team as “creative, open-minded and sometimes other-worldly… a beautiful-sounding filter plugin that’s fun to program, with a straight-forward GUI and complex modulation options”. You could say the name is well chosen.